A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 101 



in the heart and active in the life. The death of my 

 father, under circumstances now the subject of history, 

 had overwhelmed her with grief. She viewed him as 

 a victim in the cause of freedom, and cultivated his 

 memory with veneration, regarding him as a martyr, fall- 

 ing, as did his friend Warren, in the defence of the liber- 

 ties of his country. These circumstances gave a pathos 

 and vehemence to her grief, which, after the first violence 

 of passion had subsided, sought consolation in earnest 

 and solicitous fulfilment of duty to the representative of 

 his memory and of their mutual affections. Love and 

 reverence for the memory of his father was early im- 

 pressed on the mind of her son, and worn into his heart 

 by her sadness and tears. She cultivated the memory of 

 my father in my heart and affections, even in my earliest 

 childhood, by reading to me passages from the poets, and 

 obliging me to learn by heart and repeat such as were 

 best adapted to her own circumstances and feelings. 

 Among others, the whole leave-taking of Hector and 

 Andromache, in the sixth book of Pope's Homer, was one 

 of her favorite lessons, which she made me learn and fre- 

 quently repeat. Her imagination, probably, found con- 

 solation in the repetition of lines which brought to mincl 

 and seemed to typify her own great bereavement. 



1 And think'st thou not how wretched we shall be, 

 A widow I, a helpless orphan he ? ' 



These lines, and the whole tenor of Andromache's ad- 

 dress and circumstances, she identified with her own 

 sufferings, which seemed relieved by the tears my repe- 

 tition of them drew from her." 



Pope's Homer is not Homer, perhaps ; but how many 

 noble natures have felt its elation, how many bruised 

 spirits the solace of its bracing, if monotonous melody ! 

 To us there is something inexpressibly tender in this in- 

 stinct of the widowed mother to find consolation in the 



